Max Weber Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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The concept of the 'official secret' is its [bureaucracy's] specific invention.

Max Weber
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

Max Weber
Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

Max Weber
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

Max Weber
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

Max Weber
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.

Max Weber
Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.

Max Weber
An inner devotion to the task, and that alone, should lift the scientist to the height of dignity of the subject he pretends to serve.

Max Weber
The State is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence.

Max Weber
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Max Weber
Culture' is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.

Max Weber
Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Max Weber
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.

Max Weber
Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint.... The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority solely by proving his strength in life.

Max Weber
The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

Max Weber
Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

Max Weber
One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Max Weber
Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith.

Max Weber
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

Max Weber